The point is this: there is no better way to learn something than to research, organize and build a personal framework of information, facts, resources, tools and stories around it.

And yes, if I do think about it, I can only confirm that my in my experience this has certainly been the case.

Rather than learn by memorizing and going through a predetermined path that someone else has arbitrarily set for me (and thousands of others), by curating my own learning path and curriculum, I am forced to dive into discovery and sense-making for the very start, two essential ingredients for effective learning.

The change is evident: from passive memorization of predetermined info, to personal exploration, discovery and sense-making of what I am interested in pursuing.

With such an approach, the replacement of classic teachers with curators who can act as guides, coaches and wise advisors to my exploratory wanderings may be vital to the success of many learners.

Curation can therefore be a revolutionary concept applicable both to learners and their approach as well as to the new "teachers" who need to become trusted guides in specific areas of interest.

Here's the text excerpt from this article, that sparked in me these ideas:

"Reliance on any type of course textbook – digital, multimedia, interactive or otherwise – only fits as a more marginal element in student-centered learning models.

It’s not the nature of the textbook as much as its reverence in the classroom as “the” singular authority for learning.

Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources.

Instead we could prioritize “content construction”. Textbooks are an important gateway - a starting point from which students can learn and then begin their exploration of information on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encourage the “critical reading” of textbooks).

However the days when students could responsibly rely on any textbook as a singular information source are gone.

Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product.

The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today.

We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply [and] there are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content."

Content Curation Takes Time

Notwithstanding the viral content-marketing tam-tam keeps selling the idea of content curation as a miracle-shortcut to work less, produce more content and get all of the benefits that an online publisher would want to have, reality has quite a different shade.

To gain reader's attention trust and interest, it is evidently not enough to pull together a few interesting titles while adding a few lines of introductory text.

Unless your readers are not very interested themselves into the topic you cover, why would they take recomendations from someone who has not even had the time to fully go through his suggested resources?

Superficially picking apparently interesting content from titles or even automatically selecting content for others to read is like recommending movies or music records based on how much you like their trailers or their cover layouts.

Can that be useful beyond attracting some initial extra visibility?

How can one become a trusted information source if one does not thoroughly look and understand at what he is about to recommend?

This is why selling or even thinking the idea of using content curation as a time and money-saver is really non-sense.

Again, for some, this type of light content curation may work in attracting some extra visibility in the short-term, but it will be deleterious in the long one, as serious readers discover gradually that content being suggested has not even been read, let alone being summarized, highlighted or contextualized.

Content curation takes serious time.

A lot more than the one needed to create normal original content.

To curate content you need to:

Find good content, resources and references. Even if you have good tools, the value is in searching where everyone else is not looking. That takes time.

Read, verify and vet each potential resource, by taking the time needed to do this thoroughly.

Make sense of what that resource communicates or represents / offers and be able to synthesize it for non-experts who will read about it.

Synthesize and highlight the value of the chosen resource within the context of your interest area.

Enrich the resource with relevant references, and related links for those that will want to find out more about it.

Credit and attribute sources and contributors.

Preserve, classify and archive what you want to curate.

Share, distribute, promote the curated work you have produced. Creating it is not enough.

(While it is certainly possible to do a good curation job without doing exactly all of the tasks I have outlined above, I believe that it is ideal to try to do as many as these as possible, as each adds more value to the end result you will create.)

These are many more steps and activities than the ones required to create an original piece of content.

Curation is all about quality, insight and attention to details.

It is not about quantity, speed, saving time, producing more with less.

RefreshBox enables people to subscribe and create weekly 5-link-collection newsletters of their weekly professional best reads, tools or resources."

Robin Good's insight:

Refreshbox offers a good opportunity for anyone wanting to warm up to content curation without needing to invest a truckload of time.

The new free service allows you to easily pick any webpage or resource you find online, and to add your personal title and description /commentary to it, while saving to a draft newsletter that will be sent out to your readers once a week.

Contrary to what is suggested on the "What's This" page on the Refreshbox site, I strongly recommend that you do not just pick but also introduce and contextualize the gems you find, that's the real-value you can provide, while Refreshbox takes care of providing free-of-charge:

1. a web page for your curated newsletter(s),

2. a searchable hub where others can find it and

3. an easy-to-use subscription and distribution service without asking you anything in return.

Refreshbox allows you to place up to 5 links in each newsletter edition, and to hook up to other services (e.g.Product Hunt) to pick up your likes and preferences automatically and add them to your curated newsletter draft.

Excellent tool to warm-up to content curation by picking and collecting great resources to distribute via email.

This is a great curated collection of tools for journalists hand-picked by top communication and publishing professionals.

By accessing the catalog you will first get to know the contributors and then, by hovering your mouse on any expert card you will be able to uncover the three most useful, innovative and *hidden gem* tools that he has suggested for his field of expertise.

If you are a journalist or an online independent publisher producing online content, you will certainly find at least some truly useful tools that you probably have never heard about before.

This collection has been created to celebrate the 10,000th follower of @JournalismTools on Twitter. What a fantastic way to celebrate.

Valuable insight for those interested in seeing how news curation and editor's choice approaches in journalism can benefit both the publisher and its audience a lot more than simply picking and aggregating interesting stories from other sites.

One key relevant difference between aggregating news stories from other sources and editorially curated content is the role of the curator, a tangible person with specific value and ethics who readers come to respect, identify with and ultimately trust for his / her choices in what they should be paying attention to.

"Editors could become curators, cultivating the best work from both inside and outside the newsroom. ...We can form a relationship with a good curator, sometimes even a two-way relationship when we can use social networks to start a conversation with them at any moment.”

Curation and trust may indeed form the basis of a new symbiotic relationship between information seekers and subject-matter expert curators that will gradually displace the value of traditional algorithmic search.

"...some have even predicted that the future of finding content on the web will be through editorial curation, not search engine optimization.

Echostudio is a powerful new web app which allows you to aggregate, filter and combine social signals, streams, images, statistical and map data on any topic or tag you specify and to publish them online.

The new web app is particularly powerful in its ability to let you collect and mashup into one web page different kind of data and sources according to your needs without sacrificing ease of use and design elegance.

Several filtering and moderation options provide the curator with all of the tools needed to precisely control the quantity and quality of content being published.

The service generates beautiful dynamic pages, which are fully responsive and that can be published online or embedded inside your own website.

Echostudio is an ideal solution for a number of different applications including:

real-time live coverage of an event

branded social hub

information hub on a specific topic

social news aggregator

I have been impressed by Echostudio powerful backend, ease of use, and beautiful output as well as by swiss-watch precision with which you can control almost anything in it.

Kudos to Chris Saad and his team for having given birth to a such a wonderful discovery, curation and social publishing tool.

To be a better #brand #influencer and improve #online #marketing this tool could be a game-changer for many companies, #journalists and #marketers. It's great to try #socialmedia tools and see how using them can change your results. Thanks for sharing this , Robin.

The new Google Bookmark Manager got me impressed. You may call it the Pinterest for Bookmarks or the new Pearltrees

for browser favorites, but notwithstanding your preference this is a true valuable curation tool to take note of.

The new release from Google is not just a great visual bookmarking tool for anyone using the Chrome browser, but it doubles up also as a great content curation publishing tool and under a hood of simplicity it packs lots of great, immediately useful features.

The browser integrated bookmarking manager makes it in fact possible to create visual link collections by adding URLs or by using the associated browser extension while on any site. These can be easily searched, nested, sorted and organized according to your preferences.

Each new bookmark allows you to pick an associated image, is editable in its title, description and URL and can be easily dragged, moved or copied over to different collections.

Bookmark collections from other browsers can be easily imported and a feature auto-generates a set of link collections based on common subjects. In addition, if you are logged into Chrome, your collections are synced across all of your computers.

To curate and publish link collections, you only need to create a folder inside the Bookmark Manager and when it is ready for prime time, click the Share button to make it a fully public page.

N.B.: The new Bookmark Manager is not yet integrated with the Google Bookmarks service - https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ - keeping, for now, your browser bookmarks and the ones stored in the Google cloud two separate entities.

Vyer Films is a unique online film subscription service which scouts, curates and streams unique, rare author films, impossible to get to outside of international film festivals.

Vyer unique talent is in creating context around each new feature film it decides to showcase by providing interviews, collateral material and other stuff that can help the viewer get a deeper and broader understanding of what the film and its authors are about.

Josh Johnson, a filmmaker, head of acquisitions at Vyer, doesn't go to festivals but leverages the immense quantity of information already available online to find new interesting films to feature.

For just $20 per month, you gain access to Vyer Films' entire catalogue, along with each new release, and every feature. Should you choose to unsubscribe, you will still be able to watch any film released over the course of your subscription.

A great, time-saving quality resource for non-commercial film lovers looking not to waste their time browsing a huge catalogue of titles but to find someone who can help them discover and appreciate new film gems.

HackDesign is a great example of content curation at work. The team of design curators behind this site, targeted at people interested in digital/web design, has curated the very best articles into a series of lessons and the top tools into a well-categorized toolkit.

Each lesson is per se a collection of annotated pointers to existing quality articles on the topic, and the tools are individually reviewed and organized across different application areas.

The official intro: "We've asked some of the world's best designers to help us curate the best and most useful blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials that helped them learn critical elements of design. We're organizing them all into a digestible and iterative lesson plan so you can apply this knowledge to your own projects."

A model for anyone interested in creating a learning hub on any topic by curating the best content already available online.

I hate to be a parrot head, but I agree with Robin's insight that this is a neat example of how skilled curation of existing content can provide useful info AND be sustainable too. It also saves YOU time and resources as well.

Justin Fowler, co-founder of AudioPress, offers valuable insight into what the future of search and curation may be, by providing a relevant and sound pattern to look at: music.

He writes on TheNextWeb:

"Context is key for music, and that is where services like Songza and Beats Music are picking up tips from FM radio. These services are essentially using algorithms to help people discover new playlists, instead of discovering new songs. This allows for a marriage of both technology and human curation."

Accordingly, as time goes by, I expect to see search engines increasingly highlight and direct searchers to quality curators, hubs and on-topic collections and specialized resources, rather than to individual, one-topic-only pages.

Search engines will increasingly be gateways to curators and content collections rather than to individual tracks and pages.

This will be particularly true especially when you will query a topic, a theme or interest, or better yet, a musical genre.

In all of these situations, where you want to dive, discover and learn more about a topic, it is much better to be offered a selection of playlists, compilations, collections or hubs covering that theme rather than a specific song, product or artist.

That is, search and discoverability of content will rely more and more on intermediaries that will take on the load to make sense and organize in the best possible way, a specific realm of information (it can be a music genre, or the analysis of a biological topic) rather than - as it happens today - provide a linear list of individual web pages that is supposed to cover that topic.

If the music industry, is, like other times before, an early indicator of how things will work out in the future, it makes a lot of sense to expect that the future of content discovery and search will be increasingly in the hands of curators, greatly helped and supported by sophisticated, but hackable and adjustable algorithms.

Martin Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Noodle, has written an interesting article highlighting how the future of universities is about to be completely transformed, and how, similarly to what is happening in the music industry, curators, or those organization acting in such role, will play a dramatically important role in the future of higher education.

Key factors that will make this a reality are:

The price of content will freefall over the next seven years.

The supply of learning content will swell.

Education will increasingly be personalized.

"Universities will be masters of curation, working as talent agencies. They’ll draw royalties and license fees from the content professors create and curate.

In many ways, the role of the best universities will become even more focused on identifying, investing in, and harvesting the returns from great talent."

Google has introduced its new algorithm, Panda 4.0, in an effort to reward high quality, original content in the search engine's rankings. But, this doesn't mean marketers should stop curating

Robin Good's insight:

Pawan Deshpande of Curata offers a very good guide for content marketers fascinated by content curation opportunities but doubtful about the risks deriving from duplicating existing content or copying excerpts or titles from published articles.

The article provides good advice relative to SEO, general approach and strategy, managing Google search and G+ and titling by outlining the major DOs and DON'Ts of content curation for marketing.

Key recommendations to avoid problems include:

No reposting of full text articles

Curate from a varied pool of sources

Don't re-use full size images

Using no-follow tags

Using sub-domains

In the author own words: "Annotate curated content with your own insights, change titles, link to credible articles, publish from a variety of sources and ALWAYS give more than you take when it comes to third-party content."

If you are a documentary enthusiast like me, you will find plenty of great videos, curated and organized into categories and lists by visiting DocumentaryAddict.

The site, which is completely free to use, offers organised free access to nearly 5000 free documentaries already available online and keeps itself alive by using contextual ads from Google on its content pages.

Aside form the Google ads, which are not very intrusive, the site is extremely well designed and offers multiple ways to find the type of documentary you may want to watch, through 26categories, several compilation of top titles and a full search function.

Users can also rate and comment on each documenrary page providing a useful space for learning and exchanging from other fellow watchers.

A great example of sustainable content curation at work. By simply organizing and making more accessible what is already available out there, great value can be created as well as a community of passionate followers.

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Update: Due to the high number of requests free signups have been temporarily closed.** To get an account send an email to peter@defcomb.com with subject: "Interested in trying Defcomb - Recommended by Robin Good"

It is only a matter of time before trusted aggregators and human curators will become the main sources of reliable information for most people.

In fact, the January release of the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that for the first time ever, the informed public trusts more search engines - aka Google - than traditional news and media outlets.

In other words, most people prefer to see a filtered and selected variety of news from different sources, than seeing just the stories coming out of one news publisher.

Even more interesting is the fact that "Seventy-two percent trust information posted by friends and family on social media, blogs and other digital sites, while 70 percent trust content posted by academic experts." as it highlights the fact that Google and search engines may be only an intermediary step in the journey toward a news ecosystem that will see trusted human editors, experts and curators for individual subjects who aggregate and curate content from multiple sources as the key reference points for news.

This is must-read data for anyone interested in seeing where the future of news and search are headed.

If you live or plan to be in or near Amsterdam in the second week of January you may want to take note of this one-of-a-kind free event totally designed around the topic of curation.

"The Art of Curation" will take off on Wed the 14th from 5pm highlighted by a line-up of short-presentations focusing on different aspects of content curation, from the legal to the educational and commercial ones.

Speakers include:

Klaas Joosten – ZEEF

Coen Koppen – HowardsHome

Wout Laban – Gibbon.co

Eric Kokke – GOopleidingen

Merel Teunissen – Versteeg Wigman Sprey Advocaten

Dr Jan Hein Hoogstad

Marian Pronk

The strategic relevance of content curation in the future of online information, search, learning and education is the focus of my closing presentation, where I will also showcase 10+ examples of online projects that represent tangible examples of how curation can also be an economically sustainable activity.

Of note is also the fact that the event takes place in the wonderfully restored 18th-century Herengracht 182 building designed by architect Ludwich Friedrick Druck in 1772 (one of Amsterdam's first houses to be built in Louis the Sixteenth style).

Why you may want not to miss this opportunity if you are into *content curation*?

- the place and the people already signed up are worth the time

- it looks like there may be good networking opportunities

- you never say no to free food and drinks when offered

- I'll be there

The event is free for everyone to attend.

N.B.: If you plan to participate you are kindly invited to reserve your seat.

Thanks Robin! Indeed a lot of meetings on data curation by scientists and library professionals. My concern relates more to what we are doing with Scoop.it, content curation, content meaning scientific information in published papers or grey literature. HappyHolidays

Quietly is a new web-based app which allows you to create beautiful list-based slideshows which can be shared and embedded on any website.

Each card in a Quietly slideshow can be made up by a:

- website - from which you can pick any image

- an image - which you can search or upload

- a location on the map

- a name, a URL and a description

The user can also customize font styling, the cover image, and many other visual components of his slideshow.

Quietly creates a beautiful profile page for each publisher, from which one can access all of his slideshow lists as well as the main feed.

Quietly curators can also easily pick any *slide* from other lists and add it to anyone of their existing ones.

*An excellent tool to organize and present list-based information in a visual slideshow format. Very easy to use. Cool, quiet interface, makes working with it a pleasant task. Creates pro-looking presence for list publishers while allowing to embed created lists anywhere.

MonitorBook is a new free web app which allows you to track changes to any piece of content on any web page available online.

MonitorBook is very easy to use. You just install the bookmarklet available in the Instruction section of the site and then as soon as you are on a page where you want to track changes to something, you click the bookmarklet and then select the piece of content on the page that you want to track. That's it.

If you go back to your web account on MonitorBook you will find inside the section called Trackings the page element you have selected to track and any possible changes that have happened to it.

I look forward to see RSS output and more advanced options to decide every how long to check and what to report.

Handy for anyone needing to keep a page under tabs though without an alerting system the key benefit may be lost.

Scoop.it, the content discovery, curation, distribution and publishing platform has recently added some very significant improvements to its offering, that make it service even more interesting for any kind of online publisher, company or agency looking forward to find, vet and curate the best content available online on a specific topic.

The first and long-awaited new feature is the availability of multiple layout templates that Scoop.it publishers can now utilize and which can be swtiched to instantly.

The second one is full embedding of curated topics onto any web page to make it easiest for any publisher to rapidly integrate and display scoop.it content directly on their sites.

The third and most powerful new addition is the availability of a new white label direct publishing feature for WordPress-based publishers.

Although I have not had the opportunity to test this new feature, which is available only through a new Marketers subscription plan, it surely looks as the perfect fit for all those publishers who wanted to use Scoop.it more as a backend for producing curated content for their site than as a final publishing destination.

With these new additions Scoop.it consolidates itself as feature-rich, reliable and affordable content curation system that can satisfy many different types of needs: from education, to content marketing, news publishing and community building.

Ibrar Bhatt, shares some of the insights he has been been able to discover in his research work for his forthcoming PhD thesis ("A sociomaterial account of assignment writing in Further Education classrooms") for the University of Leeds.

In his short blog analysis he first comprehensively defines the new emerging content curation space, and then he highlights

the relevance this may have, once it is validated and acknowledged, in allowing students to explore the creation of reports and the development of new work assignments in a new light.

Here a few brief excerpts:

"These processes are, ... about anthologising older content to produce new content and creating a new experience for readers, by giving a new life (or new ‘reality’) to an older text.

This is curation as a digital literacy practice."

"...prolific Web users have often made themselves effective digital curators by searching and locating information, then creating a new experience by re-contextualising it."

"...Digital curation therefore is not just about finding relevant material, although that is a significant part of it, but is also about creating a specific and unique experience by utilising the resulting materials which then become contextualised within a new space.

A curator, therefore, whether she is a journalist-by-proxy such as Popova or a student completing an assignment in a classroom, not only collects and interprets, but also creates a new experience with it.

In this respect, curation is a process of problem solving, re-assembling, re-creating, and stewardship of other people’s writing."

I think this fits into Harold Jarche’s simpler seek-sense-share framework.

Why does this matter? If curation is all that Tufte and Bhatt say it is, then why aren’t scaffolds like these being used more often for training and in learning systems? I am using the curation tool Scoop.it to do curation with my freshman comp students. They use Scoop.it as their introductory platform for beginning to acquire the skills Tufte enumerates above that are part of the academic and business spaces they will eventually live in. I am hoping they will demonstrate why it curation matters as they seek-sense-share their way to long and short form ‘texts’ that they will be writing all semester. That will include essays, tweets, G+ community posts, blog posts, research papers, emails, plusses, favs, instagrams, zeegas, slideshares, pictures, and a massive mobile presence from their own digital spaces. Wish me luck.

"A curator, therefore, whether she is a journalist-by-proxy such as Popova or a student completing an assignment in a classroom, not only collects and interprets, but also creates a new experience with it."

Really Good Emails offers a curated selection of the best email newsletter designs picked, organized and curated by Matthew Smith and his team.

The site presents over 20 thematic sections, from Alerts to Survey and Welcome emails to Email Digest, Newsletter and Promotions. All sections showcase miniatures of the email collected which can be viewed in detail, both as a desktop and mobile screenshots, with just one click.

A valuable and growing design reference for email marketers and designers of all kinds. (A great match for brand sponsor Mailchimp.)

For each expert you will find a page outlining his profile and presenting, in a categorized fashion, a selected number of sources suggested by him.

"For years, and now more than ever, startup founders, investors and operators have been sharing advice on how to succeed in business. From personal blogs to up-and-coming publications, this advice has been scattered and often hard to findwhen you need it most. Startup{ery is a library for this advice, giving each resource and the important topics that they cover a home on the internet."

An excellent and well-organized resource hub for startups, Simple, easy to navigate and staffed by a highly reputable set of subject-matter-experts / curators.

A great example of the value that content curation can bring to just about any field, where there is lot of precious information scattered around and which can greatly benefit from competent and trusted "organizers".

An available bookmarklet makes bookmarking any web page only a click away and with the Unmark Chrome Extension installed you can search your links directly from Chrome’s Omnibox (the place you type in your searches or the URL you want to go to). Also, you can add all of your open tabs to Unmark with a single click. And, if you want to skip the labelling process altogether, you can right-click on a page and add it to Unmark without seeing a window (speedy speedy).

The basic version is free, open-source and immediately accessible by anyone after registration.

A "Pro" version, costing $12/year adds the capability to search through all of your bookmarks.

An elegant and easy to use tool to more effectively manage anyone with an intense bookmarking activity.

Looks very nice. Clean and simple design. But I can't see myself using it rather than Diigo. For any serious bookmarker out there Diigo Pro is just so much more capable and feature rich. It's new "Focused Research" feature is very useful. But nice try from Unmark and I'm sure for many people it will be just the ticket.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.